Every company have to handle large amount of repetitive tasks. They consume valuable time. This time can be reclaimed and used more productively by using automation.

Automation of the respective tasks historically was achieved by writing custom application. It’s a perfectly good solution to the problem, but it doesn’t come without its problems:

Not every company has a developer available to automate tasks and hiring an external contractor can be expensive. The code needs to be serviced, and often a few years down the line it may turn out to be a can of worms. You may no longer have access to the developer who wrote the original application , there may be no documentation you can reference, or perhaps the programming language has changed, or the source code is missing. Aahh! Any of these problems can results in the need to rewrite the whole application from scratch.

What if there was a way of automating repetitive tasks without the need for knowledge of any programing or scripting language? Well there is, and it is called Automate.

Automate is IT and business process automation software published by Network Automation. It is a very comprehensive platform which allows anyone to run tasks on a schedule or triggered by an event. It also allows a non-developer to script without any knowledge of programming. In addition, most system administrators will appreciate the logging and monitoring functionality included as well as an excellent automated problem resolution tool.

Automate task builder contains up to 461 activities (based on version) which can be dragged and dropped from a palette and placed in the desired sequence.

In addition to tasks Automate offers a number of triggers which can be applied to a task. Those include schedule Watcher, Folder Watcher, Performance Watcher, Event Log Watcher, Service Watcher, Process Watcher, Startup Watcher, Idle Watcher, Window Watcher, Key Watcher, SNMP Trap Watcher and WMI.

Activities include:

- If a file exist in folder A copy it to folder B, rename it, than change its permissions to read only, compress it, FTP it to remote location and send an email to you when done. In addition you can tweet: “I am the greatest system admin in the world!” You deserve some form of gratification…

- Every day at 3:00 am run a SQL query then place the results into an Excel spreadsheet, split that one spreadsheet according to some criteria into 3 different files, then play some music to celebrate, wait 3 min for your favourite tune to complete, then encrypt the 3 files, generate a key file, email that key file to your customer, connect to his network and place the files where he expects them to be.

- When the event log shows a specific error, restart the corresponding service. Then IM your IT Manager “It failed again!”, should the error repeat after the service restart, restart the whole server and send email to all your users informing them that there is unplanned maintenance work happening and that the server will be back in 5 min, then in five minutes ping the server to check if it’s live and send another email confirming that the server is back up.

As you can see there is a lot Automate can do for you. It’s impossible in a short blog to describe all 461 events and activities, but I am sure you will want to find out for yourself what Automate can do for you by downloading a free, fully functional 30 day trial to test it. It’s available here

As you can see Automate is an interesting alternative to automating repetitive tasks using custom code. It saves you time (both by performing repetitive tasks for you as well as learning new programming language). And as we all know time is money…